In recent years, various types of printing devices have become popular for both business and consumer use. In addition to traditional black and white printers, color printers, scanners, copiers, fax machines, and other components are now common. Multi-function peripherals (MFPs) that support two or more of these operations are also widely available. As these devices have grown more prevalent, they are being used for processing of more sophisticated and complicated documents that may include text and graphics.
Some of these documents contain microstructures—patterns of pixels that repeat in various locations throughout one or more pages of the document. When such a document is printed using certain types of halftoning, the microstructures may disappear completely or create patterns of interference that distort the document's contents. Thus, without addressing this problem, the printed versions of the document might not contain the same information as their digital representations.